I’ve been a regular runner for 40 years, pounding my way across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House and back. This year, thanks to a combination of heart surgery and coronavirus, I’ve become a walker, and my perspective has changed. Walking is a genial activity, requiring you to open yourself up to the world around you. Running is the opposite, a private battle with personal pain. You can see it etched on runners’ faces. They don’t smile until it’s over. I don’t think I shall take it up again. The pain of running once conditioned my life. Now I’m a walker it’s a great relief to experience, and convey, pleasure.
One of the strangely endearing things about Zoom is its visual quality. Over the years television appearances have been fine-tuned by make-up and lighting departments to ensure that we all look as good, and as similar, as possible. On Zoom we look as we really are, and generally rather worse, but with giveaways such as bookshelves, pictures on walls, the impromptu appearance of a child asking for a biscuit, we are exposed warts and all, without being tidied up for public consumption. That’s kind of reassuring. Zoom may be technically degrading, but it’s a great leveller. Mick Jagger’s living room looks as unremarkable as anyone else’s.
Acting opportunities are thin on the ground these days but I have to thank lockdown for a lucky break. As theatres across the country closed, theatre charities began to work frantically to try to relieve the plight of those quite suddenly deprived of their livelihood. One of these charities is the Royal Theatrical Fund, whose president is Robert Lindsay. Robert and I last acted together nearly 30 years ago on Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, and we have long nursed an ambition to act in Waiting For Godot together.
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